He climbs to six hundred, and picks up ice reports sent out from whalers: FLOEBERG/GROWLER 51N 10′ 45.63″ lat 36W 12′ 39.37 long… FIELD ICE 59N 42′ 43.54″ lat 14W 45′ 56.25″ long… Compagnie de Télégraphie sans Fil reports occasional light snow off Friesland. Paris comes on again; again the cycle pauses and restarts. Then Bergen, Crookhaven, Tarifa, Malaga, Gibraltar. Serge pictures gardenias tucked behind girls’ ears, red dresses and the blood of bulls. He hears news forwarded, via Port Said and Rome, from Abyssinia, and sees an African girl strumming on some kind of mandolin, jet-black breasts glowing darkly through light silk. Suez is issuing warnings of Somali raiders further down the coast. More names process by: Isle of Perim, Zanzibar, Isle of Socotra, Persian Gulf. Parades of tents line themselves up for him: inside them, dancers serving sherbet; outside, camels saddled with rich carpets, deserts opening up beneath red skies. The air is rich tonight: still and cold, high pressure, the best time of year. He lets a fart slip from his buttocks, and waits for its vapour to reach his nostrils: it, too, carries signals, odour-messages from distant, unseen bowels. When it arrives, he slips the headphones off, opens the silence cabin’s door to let some air in and hears a goods train passing half a mile away. The pulsing of its carriage-joins above the steel rails carries to him cleanly. He looks down at his desk: the half-worn pencil, the light’s edge across the paper sheet, the tuning box, the tapper. These things-here, solid, tangible-are somehow made more present by the tinny sound still spilling from the headphones lying beside them. The sound’s present too, materiaclass="underline" Serge sees its ripples snaking through the sky, pleats in its fabric, joins pulsing as they make their way down corridors of air and moisture, rock and metal, oak, pine and bamboo…
Above six hundred and fifty, the clicks dissipate into a thin, pervasive noise, like dust. Discharges break across this: distant lightning, Aurora Borealis, meteorites. Their crashes and eruptions sound like handfuls of buckshot thrown into a tin bucket, or a bucketful of grain-rich gravy dashed against a wash-boiler. Wireless ghosts come and go, moving in arpeggios that loop, repeat, mutate, then disappear. Serge spends the last half hour or so of each night up here among these pitches, nestling in their contours as his head nods towards the desktop and lights flash across the inside of his eyelids, pushing them outwards from the centre of his brain, so far out that the distance to their screen seems infinite: they seem to contain all distances, envelop space itself, curving around it like a patina, a mould…
Once, he picked up a CQD: a distress signal. It came from the Atlantic, two hundred or so miles off Greenland. The Pachitea, merchant vessel of the Peruvian Steamship Company, had hit an object-maybe whale, maybe iceberg-and was breaking up. The nearest vessel was another South American, Acania, but it was fifty miles away. Galway had picked the call up; so had Le Havre, Malin, Poldhu and just about every ship between Southampton and New York. Fifteen minutes after Serge had locked onto the signal half the radio bugs in Europe had tuned into it as well. The Admiralty put a message out instructing amateurs to stop blocking the air. Serge ignored the order, but lost the signal beneath general interference: the atmospherics were atrocious that night. He listened to the whine and crackle, though, right through till morning-and heard, or thought he heard, among its breaks and flecks, the sound of people treading cold, black water, their hands beating small disturbances into waves that had come to bury them.
ii
One night, at about half past two, Serge looks out of his bedroom window and sees a white figure gliding over the Mulberry Lawn, skirting the Orchard’s border as it heads towards the Crypt Park’s gates. It looks like Sophie; he leans out further but the figure disappears from view before he can identify it. The experience startles him-not least because it plays out in the real and close-up space around the house an aspect of some scenes that he occasionally intuits but never quite pins down when riding the dial’s highest reaches: vague impressions of bodies hovering just beyond the threshold of the visible, and corresponding signals not quite separable from the noise around them-important ones, their recalcitrance all the more frustrating for that reason. He sees these things, and hears, or half-hears, them as well, quite frequently-usually as he’s straddling the wavelength-border between consciousness and sleep. This white figure tonight’s no somnolent vision, though: it’s a real person, of the size and shape of Sophie, and dressed the way she dresses when she goes to bed each night, to boot. The next day, he visits her in her lab and asks if she was wandering about in night-skirts last night.
“What’s it to you?” she asks. “Who said you could come in here?”
“Can I come in?” he asks.
Sophie shrugs, and turns back to her work desk. She’s stayed in this room pretty much non-stop since arriving back from London, where she’s been studying natural sciences at Imperial College for two terms now. In front of her, on the desk’s surface, microscope slides smeared with variously tinted substances fan out like card-hands; dotted around these, like tokens wagered by invisible opponents, or perhaps the miniature opponents themselves, are insects, dead ones: beetles, grasshoppers and dragonflies, rigid as the dog-avatar in the Realtor’s Game. Above these, pinned to the wall, are charts, diagrams and passages written in Sophie’s hand. She doesn’t seem to object as Serge leans over her and scans a couple of them:
I placed a specimen of the Helochara family inside a jar,
one reads,
and introduced into its cell a mixture of potassium and ether until it turned onto its back and appeared dead; however, when a little ammonium was sprinkled over it, it effected a complete recovery.
Another states:
Aphrophora spumaria entomb themselves within a frothy coat of viscid cells. The bubbles not only surround the insect and the stem upon which it rests, but flow in a continuous sheet between the ventral plates and abdomen.
Beside the text, an annotated sketch shows some kind of tick embedded in a mass of spawn-like foam. Serge runs his eyes across to one of the charts. Beneath the heading “Poisonous Qualities of” a complex set of lines-straight, curving and dotted-threads disparate Latin words and letter sequences together. To Serge’s mind, cluttered with RX traffic, the sequences appear like call-signs. It’s not just the compounds on the chart that make him think this way; Sophie has highlighted certain letters of the wall’s various texts, making them stand out by drawing over them in yellow, blue or purple crayon, as though tracing from one to the other a kind of continuum, a grander alphabetic sequence slowly emerging from the general eclectic mesh. Most intriguingly of all, a study of the Emperor moth, complete with illustration demonstrating the vibratory capacities of its antennae, carries the word, written in brackets in the margin, “Morse.”
“Morse?” asks Serge. “Do moths know that?”
“What?” she murmurs-then, following his eye towards the wall, scoffs: “No, stupid; no connection. Professor Morse, an entomologist from Nanterre, France.”
She doesn’t venture any more, and turns back to the slide in front of her. She seems preoccupied-full not of the eager energy with which she used to throw herself into their chemistry experiments, but with a more concerned and troubled set of mental compounds. She looks haggard, much older than she did six months ago; staring at her cheeks, Serge can see worry-lines snaking their way down from her eyes towards the corners of her mouth.